A rant sent to us by Robert Kyle. He wrote it some time ago and certainly before the election and change of government. If that makes any difference at all ...
We Brits seem to have lost our sense of nationality and our deep-rooted origins somewhere among all the dumbed-down television and immigration control. I suppose this is better than raping and pillaging foreign countries for their wealth and making it ours ... but wait a minute, sugar, we’re still doing that - just look at oil rich Iraq! We bombed hell out the place then came along like good Samaritans and offered to rebuild it all. Not for free of course; nope, we’re taking their oil!
How many people did Saddam Hussein kill? I ain’t sure, I never met the guy. But I can be certain that his total is far below that of British and American forces who were, and still are, there to free and liberate the place. Democracy? You’re having a laugh!
And what about Afghanistan? Why would we possibly want to go sticking our noses in there? Sure, we had those terrorist bombings and we can’t tolerate that - but just for one minute turn the situation around and pretend you’re an Afghan: entire communities have been wiped out by us foreigners and our fancy bombs! Who are the bigger terrorists, us or them?
I am by no means condoning the terror attacks around the world but proportionally they are completely off-kilter. One thing you should not even consider is the strategic position of the country and the need for a lovely oil pipeline …
OK, so I mention the two little ‘wars’ that seem to be happening at present … as usual, it’s we who are the victors, but only because the majority of the opposition are fighting with sticks and stones. That, though, is their own fault. (Yes, I'm sure we'd have been only too happy to sell them guns. We sell to everyone else, so why not? - GOS)
Rather than wallowing in war stories and conspiracies, let's move on to things that are more interesting. It really isn’t hard to pick and choose an area to focus attention on, as every single thing on the planet seems to be broken or doomed. The politicians, in between making expenses claims, are on the television on an hourly basis bleating about a need for this camera and that database and more police officers and tighter controls.
If you were new to the country, had passed your ‘Britishness Test’ and were given the keys to your residence then no doubt you would at some point see a television. With your translator keeping you up to date with the news you would quickly barricade the doors and never venture out! You would know, like the rest of us, that our own country is under siege. Not from terrorists or aliens but from politically correct individuals who simply need to raise awareness of every single conceivable thing which may or may not affect our quality of life.
It is no longer a matter of whether it directly affects our lives or not. It has evolved (just like a 'flu virus) into something which ‘might’ affect our lives or has affected someone else’s and is coming to a place near you shortly. It’s no longer a case of dealing with issues as they happen or even trying to prevent things from happening through insight and ingenuity. That all disappeared with the decent BBC television back in the early 1990s … what we have instead is a bunch of scared individuals who spend their time coming up with ever creative ways in which to inflict their own miseries on everyone else.
Now I, like most other people, could take this seriously if it genuinely was people caring for our welfare - but somewhere in amongst it all is an accountant. These people fall under many guises in this current climate but at the end of the day they are people who, basically, do the sums. Every single thing that happens in modern life has a ‘cost’ attached to it. Every thing that you or I do has to generate money for someone, somewhere. Every Government initiative has to be ‘self financing’. You may at this point question why we pay taxes ‘directly’ to the coffers when there are that many ‘stealth taxes’ floating around …
What I am getting to in the end is that ‘JUSTICE’ needs to pay for itself. If you go to court and represent yourself then you are limiting the money to be made by lawyers. It doesn’t matter that you can convey the correct circumstances surrounding your ‘situation’ rather than a lawyer who hits a few truths and then stumbles into oblivion and baffles everyone with their amazing intellect. Lawyers need their large fees and their positions protecting just the same as every other ‘trade’ on the planet. The end result is a complex and hard-to-understand judicial system which does not serve the public but funds the lavish houses of individuals who do little more than ‘talk’ for a living.
Not content with just preaching in a court house they have instead moved into government. Just look at New Labour and count the number of lawyers who make up their cabinet. We citizens merely want to go about our lives in a normal, everyday fashion without enduring hardship and suffering. Instead what we experience is stealth tax after stealth tax, all on the basis of ‘what if?’. We are constantly bombarded with horror stories on the television which are sensationalised to the point of non-belief. We are harassed to our wits' end with advertisements about the latest ‘money making’ virus which is going to destroy mankind, not to mention the myth that is global warming …
So where did justice go?
It got buried among the archives of what used to be a reasonably fair society of people. It was priced out of the market and instead replaced with fancy advertisements. The people in charge took their eyes off the ball and decided that putting a new kitchen in their ‘second home’ was far more important than serving the very people who put them into the position of trust and expectation that they so unfairly found themselves in. It doesn’t matter that you or I work our socks off to simply put food on the table or keep our houses, as we also have to keep their houses and their second houses (and their partners' houses and no doubt their second cousins' uncle's house too!) They’ve earned it, after all, and we haven’t. We must pay for our inferiority.
Justice was lost when it became a form of taxation. When the lawyers and everyone else involved in the judicial system realised the goldmine they were sitting on greed, took over like the plague, and the firm building blocks of democracy and common decency crumbled under their relentless pressure. What was good for mankind was no longer important, and instead what was good for them became the end goal. Forget the fact that visiting the shops late at night is an endless hurdle to avoid drunks, robbers and attackers. The lawyers don’t care and neither do the politicians as they can profit from it and, indeed, actively encourage it! They can also preach to the public about what a great job they’re doing through over-advertising the little successes they feel will ‘connect’ with the good people who serve them.
The rich will continue to get richer and the poor will continue their descent into oblivion. There is absolutely no way to stop it from happening, but now we also need to contend with the fact that on our way down that slippery slope we can no longer expect to have any assistance or protection from the very people who we support in order to help us. Those very people are long gone, down to their personal ‘benefits office’ which is slightly different from our own experience of the place we go to when we need help.
In their brief cases, tucked away in the depths, are justice and fairness, long forgotten as an unnecessary expense of the 20th Century, they are now the new income stream for the 21st. A bit like oil, except that laws and regulations never run out: you just invent new ones, or tighten up the old ones and stick a fancy advert on the back end portraying the new ones as the answers to all of society's problems whilst sneaking in an ‘invoice’ for a few shrubs and a couple of toilet seats …
The GOS says: Thanks, Robert.
I have to say that I don't entirely agree with Robert's view of the Iraq and Afghan wars, but obviously he's entitled to hold his own opinions and obviously he holds them very strongly.
Where I do agree with him is about government, the law, and the profit motive. He's right on the money there. I am in the middle of reading the most astonishing book called “The Silent State” by Heather Brooke – as soon as I've finished I'll post a page about it and provide a link to it on Amazon. Already I know I'm going to have to describe it as required reading for all grumpies, for everyone even vaguely interested in or worried about politics ... in other words, for anyone over 50 with half a brain.
And the profit motive in public life is exactly what it's about, Robert Kyle, just as you said. Not just in the law courts, but in every sphere of public service – the government, the civil service, local government, public bodies like Her Majesty's Stationery Office or the Ordnance Survey – they've all leapt eagerly aboard the bandwagon and are determined to make a profit out of us, conveniently forgetting that they were set up in the first place with our money in order to serve our interests.
Here's a simple example, quoted in the book. The Post Office is run like a company, but 100% of the shares are owned by the government. We pay for the government, so therefore we pay for the Post Office. It's our post office, in other words. Some time ago they set up the system of post codes and insisted that we use them so they could deliver letters more efficiently. Since we own the Post Office, it follows that we also own the post codes.
But suppose that, for some reason, you wanted a list of all the post codes in the country? You know, your post codes, distributed across your country by your Post Office?
Will the Post Office let you have it?
Well, yes. At a price. About £4,000, in fact. They want you to give them £4,000 for a piece of information that belongs to you and that you have, through your taxes, paid for.
See what Robert's talking about?
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
Copyright © 2011 The GOS